A startup called Choose Energy is offering consumers a comparison shopping site for electricity in deregulated markets, and is building tools to help retail energy providers acquire customers. The company raised a series A round from Kleiner and Stephens Capital.

There’s a perception in Silicon Valley that smart thermostat startup Nest created the world’s first connected thermostat. While the Nest thermostat is gorgeous and potentially a game-changing, there’s dozens of companies that are making smart thermostats and software, and here’s a dozen of them in photos:

Last year was a great year for GigaOM Pro, and 2012 promises to be even better. Jo Maitland recently joined our team as a Research Director for Enterprise, and she will help us produce more research in the enterprise IT and cloud computing spaces.

Forget the hardware. It is becoming abundantly apparent that what will matter for smart meters is how well data can be used to manage demand response, outages and balance load while also being secure, says Adam Lesser, GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst.

Despite the exuberant expectations for the adoption of electric cars, forecasts have been conservative, with global annual sales expected to be around a million in 2015, compared to the global auto market of around 70 million vehicles today, writes Adam Lesser, GigaOM Pro’s Green IT analyst.

Will Apple embrace solar in any meaningful way? Seems like even Apple is realizing that it needs to hedge its brand against being labeled anti-environment. Now that Apple is the 800 pound gorilla of tech, managing negative publicity surrounding its sustainability practices will matter more.

The third quarter’s numbers are out from the Green IT section of GigaOM’s research subscription service GigaOM Pro. Solar is struggling, while IT-based systems like car sharing are soaring. Dig into the details with us.

Florida-based Tellago Studios has developed a platform that will allow data center managers to control their data centers from a smartphone, which could be a critical next step in the life of a data center engineer, points out GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst Adam Lesser.

Cleantech, meet mobile. The intersection between these two industries has grown over the past twelve months as companies increasingly look to use smartphones as a platform to enable their services, according to a new report from our GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst Adam Lesser.

Now for Today in Green IT, news, notes and musing from our GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst Adam Lesser. Nuclear power is falling in Germany and Japan, as corporations follow suit from country-wide protests and anti-nuclear politics.

Google has aggressively argued that PUE (the measurement of how efficient a data center is) must be constantly measured to be accurate. But there is a need also to go beyond PUE. For our Today in Green IT, here’s how to go beyond PUE:

It’s time for Today in Green IT! Another bit of interesting info from Google’s new green site is how aggressively Google argues that PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) needs to be measured as often as possible, points Adam Lesser, our GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst.

Greentech investing has been getting a series of one-two punches — will it soon be down for the count? According to the weekly update from out GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst Adam Lesser, while the ecosystem is looking darker, it’s also growing up.

In light of solar startup Solyndra’s announcement this week that the company plans to file for bankruptcy, we decided to turn to our readers to hear about what you think are the most important impacts and lessons learned. We got some very interesting feedback.

And now for Today in Green IT, a daily blurb from the curator of our research service. Today’s topic: the modular data center continues to pick up steam as a solution to the growth of cloud computing and the need to produce energy-efficient data centers.

With the stock market gyrating, as many companies shutting down as starting up and big IPOs possibly going on hold, we want to know what you think about startup investment. Answer our brief survey, and you’ll be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card.

Google+ is the company’s latest attempt to get access to the kind of data users generate when they post status updates, share photos and post comments. These social “signals” are becoming a crucial part of our online lives, and that is affecting the entire search industry.

Something I thought about a lot while writing about OpenStack yesterday is how much it democratized access to cloud computing in just a year. But OpenStack is just one example of how information technology, overall, is undergoing a period of arguably unprecedented democratization.

Google is shifting responsibility for Google TV into its YouTube division, hoping that the video site will be able to help the gearheads at Google TV with a lesson in striking content deals. But if that’s the case, it will most likely be disappointed.

One of the most common questions often asked is how to get your app reviewed by the various iPhone blog sites around the Internet. While there is no guaranteed method, SlapApp.com’s co-founder Ryan Johnson has a few pointers to help you build a relationship with reviewers.

How can a developer prosper in the competitive space of mobile apps? You tell us. If you’re a mobile app developer, please take our survey to help us see where the market is going. We want to know about platforms, profits and popular apps.

If we know one thing about our readers, it’s that you use the latest mobile phone platforms and newest gadgets, and you have strong opinions about which devices to buy next. Take our mobile survey to help us identify the next big trends in mobile.

Enterprise video conferencing is growing 29 percent per year, but growth is still hampered by the fact that there is no interoperability between systems deployed by some of the biggest vendors. GigaOM Pro analyst Lisa Pierce is predicting that the sector could explode without those barriers.

Ten years ago it would have been unimaginable, both technically and culturally, to work from a coffee shop. Today, it’s a reality. This morning, between 9:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., we are gathering to discuss “The Future of Work” at the latest GigaOM Bunker Session.

A new cable standard for home theater networking will enable you to connect your PC to your TV, even if the two devices are more than 300ft apart. The technology is based on standard CAT6 networking cables, so there’s no need for pricey Monster Cables anymore.

Today on the Net: YouTube adds a vuvuzela button for World Cup fans who miss the horns while watching online videos, KickApps adds an application development suite for Facebook and licensing firm Rumblefish is pitching cheap music licenses for non-commercial use in YouTube videos.

Unlike so many others in the media, we decided not to charge for what we’d already been giving away for free. Instead we developed GigaOM Pro, a subscription-only research service. That was only a year ago — look how far it’s already come.

Thought Google’s upcoming Androind-based Google TV platform was just about advertising? Think again: TV apps are estimated to generate nearly $1.9 billion in revenue by 2015, according to a new report from our friends at GigaOm Pro titled TV Apps: Evolution from Novelty to Mainstream.

The sale of 800,000 plug-in vehicles during by 2015 will create a slew of challenges for utilities, automakers and consumers. IT companies have a $1.5 billion opportunity to offer equipment and software that could help ease the pain of that influx.

Today we’re hosting our 9th Bunker Session here at GigaOM HQ in San Francisco, devoted to cloud computing in the enterprise. The event itself is invite-only, but a live video stream and archive footage will be available exclusively at GigaOM Pro, starting at 9:30 a.m. PT.

Quite a bit of news emerged from the cloud computing and data center markets during the fourth quarter, but the full impact of announcements — from companies including Cisco, Vmware, EMC, Microsoft, and Oracle — won’t be felt until 2010. Here’s a look at what to expect.

In the fourth quarter, the giants and the social supersites hooked up — Twitter’s real-time firehose went to Google and Microsoft, Facebook Connect scored Yahoo — while startups set the stage for what’s next — for instance OneRiot providing real-time ads to Digsby.

Real-time social applications for the enterprise have real products and real customers and about 18-24 months of lead time, but 2010 is the year that startups making such apps will be faced down by the likes of tech giants such as Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce.com

As this year and decade pull to a close, we’ve collected the top five winning and losing technologies and companies for each of the five major areas that GigaOM Pro covers: infrastructure, mobile, consumer tech, real-time web, and green technology.

When I was looking for funding for GigaOM nearly three years ago, I had a very simple, four-slide presentation: Two slides focused on the past, the other two on my plan to build the company. It wasn’t exactly complicated: all I wanted to do was build multiple revenue streams from our core competency of analyzing key technology trends and business news. Today, we’re advancing to the next slide, with the launch of GigaOM Pro, our subscription-only research and analysis service.